19 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 Respect is a Scientific Virtue

The society of scientists must be a democracy.® It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the views of Others, and tolerance for them. The crux of the ethical problem is to fuse these, the private and the public needs. Tolerance alone is not enough; this is why the bland, kindly civilizations of the East, where to contradict is a personal affront, developed no strong science. And independence is not enough either: the sad his...
  1  notes

Mutual respect, building ideas on other ideas, is crucial to how science works.

08 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 The Various Ways of Exterminating a Race

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious dise...
  1  notes

H.G. Wells gives a sad history of how various empires have extinguished other cultures.